


Stranded at the Drive-in

by gallopingmelancholia



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Erica has a potty mouth, F/M, First Date, Fluff, No hanky panky. Dustin is a perfect gentleman, One-Shot, There's some swearing tho
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-10
Updated: 2020-07-10
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:48:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25178683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gallopingmelancholia/pseuds/gallopingmelancholia
Summary: “Yeah, she’s hot and underage, don’t think about it,” Robin says, later that night, as they’re hanging out at Steve and Robin’s shared apartment, passing a joint back and forth.“Whoa,” Dustin says, “I’m not!”“How does Lucas feel about you calling his sister jailbait?” Steve asks.“JESUS. I never said that! I hate you guys.”**19-year-old Dustin comes back from college for the summer to find that Erica leveled up in hotness. When her first date goes wrong, he escorts her home.
Relationships: Dustin Henderson & Erica Sinclair, Dustin Henderson/Erica Sinclair, background Lucas/Max - Relationship, background Mike/El
Comments: 6
Kudos: 24





	Stranded at the Drive-in

The Party doesn’t throw him a welcome back shebang like they did when he came home from Camp Know Where a few summers ago, but they all hang out together soon enough.

“How was counselloring?” Eleven asks, once all the hugs have been given out.

“Way more work than I thought it’d be. Kids are exhausting, I don’t know what I was thinking,” Dustin says. And it’s true, but it was also a lot of fun. He tried to be to those kids what Mr. Clarke was to his students, and he thinks he did OK. And the money was pretty good. Better than working at the video store or scooping ice cream.

They’re hanging out in the Wheeler front yard, sitting around and drinking a couple beers. El and Mike are still together (Mike’s going to propose once he graduates from college, he’s already told Dustin and Lucas. It makes Dustin feel far less grown-up than Mike, even though they’re both rising sophomores in college), and Lucas and Max are in an On Again phase in their on-again-off-again romance, so Dustin and Will are sitting together, watching the couples sit in each other’s laps and whatnot. It’s exactly the same as when they were kids five years ago, but somehow different. Eventually they’re going to live apart for good. It makes Dustin sad.

A pack of teenage girls rides by on their bikes, laughing and carrying on. Lucas yells at one of them. “I hope you get hit by a car!”

She stands up on her pedals and shouts back, “I’ll kill you in your sleep!” Until then, he hadn’t known who it was, but it could only be Erica. She looks good. Very good. Her hair is in box braids that hang down her back, and she got tall—her legs look long and thin because of her short shorts, but her body is curvy in a way he registers is very different from the last time he saw her. She's 15 now--still too young for him, but not so young that it's creepy for him to be admiring her, he hopes. He finds himself staring at her ass as she rides away.

“Wait, Lucas, when did your sister get hot?” he blurts out.

“Uh, she didn’t, what the hell, man?”

“Come on, don’t look at me like that. Will? Back me up.”

Will laughs.

“Ha, wrong person to ask, sorry, I forgot. Mike? She’s cute, right?”

“We can agree on cute,” Mike says, glancing at El, who also nods.

“Cute’s fair,” Max agrees. “She’s going to be gorgeous when she grows up, though, I think.” Lucas stares at her. She corrects course. “In like, several years. Like her brother. Good genes.”

“Cute isn’t hot,” Lucas says. “And she’s not that either.”

“I’m asking Robin, Robin will agree with me.” Luckily, Mike changes the subject to Thundercats. 

“Yeah, she’s hot and underage, don’t think about it,” Robin says, later that night, as they’re hanging out at Steve and Robin’s shared apartment, passing a joint back and forth.

“Whoa,” Dustin says, “I’m not!”

“How does Lucas feel about you calling his sister jailbait?” Steve asks.

“JESUS. I never said that! I hate you guys.”

“He’s not happy about it,” Will adds. (Robin has taken Will under her wing as the only baby gay she knows in Hawkins. He practically lives with Steve and Robin now.)

“It’s so hard to tell with Henderson because remember Suzie? He literally compared her to Phoebe Cates. He’s not the best judge of hotness,” Steve says.

“Suzie WAS hot, fuck you guys.”

“Suzie was pretty,” Will says diplomatically. “And wholesome.”

“You’re making her sound like Raisin Bran,” Dustin says. “She helped us save the world.”

“It was messed up that she made you perform like a monkey for her first,” Robin says.

“There was absolutely no way for her to know the stakes were that high,” Dustin says. “And it was performing _with_ her.”

“Still weird,” Robin says.

“Yeah, well, you’re weird and so’s your mom,” Dustin says, and they drop the subject.

Dustin’s got a few weeks between the end of his camp counselor job and the start of his second year as a bio major at Indiana State, and Will cooked up a new D&D campaign specifically for their overlapping visits home, since the other members of the Party are all also away at college during the school year. They split it between three long days, trading off hosting duties: Dustin’s, Lucas’s, Mike’s. The second day, they arrive at around noon, and Erica is at the kitchen table, eating a bowl of cereal and reading _The Age of Unreason_ by Charles Handy.

“Get out,” Lucas says, starting to set up.

“Rude,” Erica says, not budging.

“Hey, want to sit in and watch?” Dustin asks.

“No,” Erica says. “D&D is for losers.”

“Last I checked you were a loser,” Dustin says.

“I’m not a loser, I’m a national treasure.”

“National treasures can play D&D with their friends.”

“We’re not friends.”

“We’re not enemies,” Dustin says, kind of hurt. He really thought they’d bonded that summer with the Russians under the mall. “Didn’t you ever play with that set we gave you?”

Erica’s about to say no but Dustin knows for a fact that she’d be lying. “Yeah and it wasn’t fun,” she says.

“Then you weren’t doing it right,” Dustin says.

“Hey, if she doesn’t want to play, she doesn’t want to play,” Max says.

“What else do you have going on today?” Lucas asks. “Go do that.”

It just so happens that all of her friends are out at summer jobs or camps or summer school, and that this summer has been excruciatingly boring without them. She didn’t sit out in the kitchen with the express purpose of having someone to interact with besides her parents. Not consciously, anyway. But Dustin is right to detect in her a reluctance to go sit alone in her room.

“We’re mid-campaign, she couldn’t join us even if she wanted to,” Lucas says.

“She could, we’ve added people late before,” El says.

“Can I be in charge?” Erica asks.

“No,” Will and Lucas say at the same time.

She gives Dustin a “Oh well what can you do?” face, but she moves the finger she’d been using to mark her page and replaces it with her bookmark, closing the book and putting it to the side. She’s not going anywhere.

“I bet I could come up with a character that could work into the story,” Will says.

“Can I be a girl, not some goblin or elf?” Erica asks.

“Sure.”

“And I want to die at the end of the day, I’m not continuing this tomorrow,” she adds in that demanding tone of hers. It makes Dustin smile to hear it again.

In the end, it’s agreed that Erica will play a mysterious traveler who joins the party as a Rogue. She spends a lot of her turns trying to get the party into trouble, and Lucas spends a fair amount of his trying to kill her character. It’s all in good fun, though. Lucas isn’t half as annoyed as he pretends to be, and Erica is enjoying herself too. She’s creative and a quick thinker, and she’s definitely spent several hours playing before, since she never needs anything to be explained and can manipulate the rules to get what she wants quickly and efficiently. And she’s hilarious.

“You’ve got a _mouth_ on you,” Dustin says admiringly after she goes on a particularly vulgar rant at Mike’s Paladin character when he foils one of her plots.

“Don’t encourage her,” Lucas says.

“Some of that was poetry,” Dustin says. “The girl knows how to use profanity. It’s impressive.”

“We should never have let her listen to George Carlin with us,” Mike says.

“I learned this art from Richard Pryor, and fuck you, white boy, you’re dead to me,” Erica says.

“You like Eddie Murphy?” Dustin asks her.

“He’s fine.”

“He’s my favorite.”

“He’s just OK.” She says this as if it’s the final word on the matter.

He shouldn’t find her dismissiveness charming, but he does. He respects confidence since his is usually fleeting. “Fair enough.”

When it gets to be dinnertime, Erica decides she’s ready to leave.

“OK, someone kill me,” she says, looking at Will.

Lucas claps and rubs his hands together. His roll ends with her character’s entrails hanging out of a tree. It’s gruesome.

“If you want to come back tomorrow I can bring you back from the dead,” Will says to her quietly. Dustin kind of hopes she’ll say yes. He had a great time with her.

“Nope, this was a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence,” she replies. “Peace out.”

And she walks out of the kitchen, bopping Lucas in the head with her book and flattening his afro. Max laughs while he fluffs it back up, looking sourly at her.

For once, this summer doesn’t have a supernatural crisis that they need to risk their lives defeating, so hanging out with the gang is pretty much all Dustin does those next two weeks. On Saturday night, they’ve all piled into Mike’s car to go to the drive-in; there’s a double feature of _Batman_ and _Beetlejuice_ playing. Dustin’s in line for the porta-potty when he hears a car door slam and some teenage boy shouting “Fuck you, you ugly bitch!” and a few disgusting racial slurs. He glances up to see someone rapidly walking away from a green Camaro. She looks shaken and furious, and he recognizes her with surprise as Erica.

She sees him and freezes for just long enough that he can tell that she wishes she hadn’t seen him. Without even thinking, he goes up to her and gently squeezes her shoulders.

“Are you OK?”

“Yeah, I’m fine, let’s just go.” Oh no, she’s close to tears. Dustin can’t handle crying women. She pulls him away by his hand, walking away from the bathrooms, through the labyrinth of dark cars and dusty gravel.

“Who was that?”

“David Albright.”

“Stacey’s brother?”

“Yeah. We were on a date.”

“That whole family is worthless,” he says.

“Well, I wouldn’t let him feel me up so he called me a bitch and a ni—“

“I’m gonna kill him,” Dustin says, turning around.

“Please don’t, I just want to leave,” Erica says, pulling him back by his hand.

“Was he your ride?”

“Yeah.”

“Motherfucker. OK, come with me.” She really must be shaken, since she follows willingly, without comment. Dustin makes his way back to Mike’s car and knocks on the window so he and El will stop making out long enough to acknowledge his presence.

“Something came up, I’m walking home and I didn’t want you to worry about me. Lucas, when you get a chance, you need to beat the shit out of David Albright. He’s got a green Camaro. Ask Steve if you can borrow that baseball bat of his, the one with the nails. Can I have that box of cotton candy?”

“What?”

“I’m just gonna take it,” Dustin says, reaching in. He takes a fresh Coke too.

“Do you want me to come with you?” Will asks from the backseat.

“I’m fine, don’t worry about it.”

He pretends he doesn’t see Erica wiping her eyes when he gets back to her. He thrusts the candy and Coke at her. “Come on, let’s take a walk.” She takes the candy but doesn't open it. He wraps an arm around her shoulders protectively as they make their way towards the road.

“Was that your first date with him?”

“First date ever,” Erica admits.

“That _blows_ ,” Dustin says. “What a _douchebag._ ”

“I thought he was nice,” Erica says quietly. “He seemed nice.”

“He fucking sucks, and he’s not even right. You’re not ugly and you’re not a bitch.”

She kicks at a rock, sending it skittering down the sidewalk. “I am too a bitch.”

“Well, yeah, but not in a bad way. In a fun way.”

“I thought so too but I guess not.”

“No, don’t ever doubt yourself because of guys like that.”

She kicks the rock again. It's suddenly very important to him that she knows how awesome she is. 

“You brought down a secret Russian plot to open an alternate dimension when you were ten years old, you have nothing to feel bad about ever compared to a skidmark like that guy.”

“You’re right. I am better than him. He failed calculus,” Erica says.

“ _He failed calculus_ ,” Dustin says. “What a stupid asshole.”

“He’s going to vote for Ross Perot,” she says.

“He's _what?_ ” Dustin says.

“Red flag, looking back.”

“What a cunt.” Dustin has never used that word in his life before, but it feels right, in that moment. It startles a laugh out of her.

“He wishes,” she says. “At this rate, he’ll never get his hands on one.” She giggles, and it makes Dustin laugh, and then they can’t stop. Several minutes of hooting laughter later, he has to open the Coke and take a drink to keep himself from coughing and choking on his spit.

“Give me a sip,” she says, and takes it from him. He watches her bring it up to her plump lips, the way her throat works when she swallows.

“Don’t stare at me,” she says.

“I wasn’t!” He was definitely staring. She’s got some kind of lipstick or chapstick or something shiny on her mouth. He vaguely wonders what it tastes like. “Tell me everything that’s wrong with Bill Clinton.”

Her ranting lasts the rest of the walk home, a good two miles. His arm’s been around her shoulders the whole time, keeping them both warm.

The porch light is on at the Sinclair house.

“Are your parents waiting up?”

“Naw,” she says.

“But you can get in?”

“Yeah, I’ll be fine.” She stops, and she looks kind of shy. It’s weird, seeing her like that. It makes Dustin nervous. “Listen, thanks. You didn’t have to do this.”

“I wanted to. You’re cool, I like hanging out with you.”

She smiles, and goes up on her tippytoes to plant a short, firm kiss on his lips.

“Cotton candy,” he says, licking his lips, a little dazed.

“What?”

“You taste like cotton candy, but you didn’t even eat any. I ate the whole box.”

“It’s called lipgloss, dumbass.”

Dustin smiles. “You know what I like about you? How condescending you are.”

“I didn’t ask.” But she kisses him on the cheek and heads inside. He walks home whistling.

**Author's Note:**

> lol I don't know how to play D&D. This takes place in 1992 and I've just guessed at how old that makes everyone. Time isn't real. Erica grows up to be a stockbroker, you can't change my mind about this.


End file.
